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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

That seems like a missed opportunity. If you're renaming anyway, why not make it easier for people to understand what's going on?

I mean I don't think the browser analogy is that great, it seems more the exception than the rule. Eg most IRC clients have the word IRC in them, or something very close (eg mIRC, irssi, etc). Most email clients have the word "mail" in them. Torrent clients, same. Why shouldn't a Matrix client have the word Matrix in it?

Just call it iMatrix or uMatrix or something like that, and you're removing a lot of confusion. If mIRC and uTorrent and Gmail can get away with that, so can you.

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If there's a class of Matrix clients, naming one of the Matrix is more confusing than not. Probably call it Spoon, or Kung-Fu (as in "I know Kung-Fu"), but probably not LotsOfGuns.

I don't think anybody is confused that Deluge and PicoTorrent are both Torrent clients.

(and I also think PicoTorrent will get more downloads because it's easier to Google for)

> Most email clients have the word "mail" in them

Such as thunderbird, icedove, mutt, gnus, mew, outlook, outlook express, etc?

Most of those are very niche products. The big mail clients are: Gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, Apple’s “Mail”. Outlook is really the only outlier.

Thunderbird is absolutely not niche.

Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail are email services first and foremost. Most native clients do not have mail in the name.

At this point, probably most (non-mobile) native clients other Outlook probably can be considered niche. For consumer email, webmail has won.

We could quibble over how we're defining niche, but looking to our less technical friends that still use a variety of consumer & enterprise tech products/services daily is quite clarifying. My close friends, whether they work @ Impossible Foods on supply chain, @ a CA high school teaching history (now remotely), or @ SMB SAAS company (Hubspot competitor, forgetting name) HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THUNDERBIRD IS.

And they likely think that the computer monitor is the actual computer.

Is Yahoo Mail or Apple Mail really that different to Foobar Matrix Client (shortened to Foobar)?

Irrelevant to what I said. We talked about most products.

I guess the better point would be that they used to have, when email wasn't as widespread as it is today.

>Most email clients have the word "mail" in them.

Yes, but mail isn't the same as SMTP or IMAP or POP.

When I speak about email, I don't say "I'm sending you an SMTP message". I say "I'm sending you an email (message)". For all intents and purposes (besides writing code involving these protocols), the name of the protocol is "email".

In public communication, it almost never helps to start a sentence with "well, technically".

What I mean is that "mail" was a thing before email protocols existed. "Mail" and even "email" has meaning beyond any specific technology.

The name told you what you could expect the technology to do. That's why it made sense to include these words in the name of email clients.

The same is not true for "Matrix".

What is the equivalent? One of these: instant messaging, group messaging, teamware, groupware, team chat, group chat ... ?

Chat seems to be closest?

So MatrixChat might work?

Genuinely asking.

> I don't say "I'm sending you an SMTP message". I say "I'm sending you an email (message)".

Well, that's only sensible—you're not sending an SMTP message. SMTP isn't a message format. It's a wire protocol for passing along pre-formatted messages. What you're sending is a MIME message, over SMTP. (Just like you send HTML over HTTP.)

The distinction is even clearer in the email case, actually, because those same MIME messages also show up in other transfer protocols (POP, IMAP.)

There are actually a few email clients that use "MIME" in their names. But it's pretty rare.

Conveniently, though, "MIME" is short for "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions", so "Mail" is actually in the name. ;)

Oh boy, just wait til you see how many protocols make up an IPSec implementation :)

Those get named after the overall framework (if they're not just named "fooVPN" or simply "foo") even though there's no single IPSec protocol, and many many different underlying protocols.

Most IRC clients? Weechat, Hexchat, Quassel, Konversation. Torrent clients? Transmission, Deluge, Vuze. I padded my lists a little, but I really do think "most" is an extreme and strange claim here. Weechat and Hexchat are the most-used IRC clients among people I know, just as Transmission and Deluge are the most popular bittorrent clients among people I know. irssi and rtorrent are also pretty popular, but it's no less common for things with names seemingly unrelated to their protocol to be used.

Ok, maybe this doesn't apply to most clients, but I think op still has a point. If there are at least some email clients with the word "mail" in their name and at least some torrent clients with the name torrent in their name why shouldn't riot use the word "matrix" inside it's name? It's not that they must, but like op said it would make things clearer, in my opinion something like MatrixChat would be OK.

Or call the exemplar client Matrix and refer to the others as The Matrix Protocol and The Matrix Foundation, license the trademark to third parties so they can call themselves Matrix FluffyChat, and let the 1%er curses Haskell client call itself frogwibbler safe in the knowledge that the odd name isn’t going to hold back general adoption.

Indeed. This is going to be one of the maany missed opportunities by Matrix in a series of missed opportunities. Just call it Matrix Web/Mobile/Desktop.

My vote is for “RMatrix”.

In English, the R makes for a good pun.

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